So excited to be reading this book for our upcoming Book Club! It’s not too late to join in (register at IntegratedSchools.org)
If you’d like to participate in the Book Club conversation but also like to cheat (or can’t/don’t want to buy the book), here’s a nice video presentation on Making the Unequal Metropolis by the author 🙂
“In ‘Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits’, Teachers College, Columbia University historian Ansley Erickson explores the legal and political battles surrounding the desegregation of public schools in Nashville. By 1990, almost no school within Nashville’s metropolitan school district had high concentrations of black or white students—making it one of the most successful examples of desegregation in the 20th century. However, since being released from court-ordered busing in the mid-1990s, schools have quickly resegregated, concentrations of poverty have intensified, and academic scores for black students in Nashville have suffered.
Erickson shows that desegregation was not all rainbows and butterflies, and it often created new challenges that families were forced to wrestle with. She also shows how school segregation had been no accident. Rather, it was a result of deliberate choices made by politicians, parents, real estate developers, urban planners, and school administrators—ranging from funneling subsidies to build schools in suburban areas, to privileging white families when making zoning and student assignment decisions.
And yet for all the challenges that desegregation entailed, Erickson also lets us hear the voices and positive experiences of students who went through desegregation—voices that were routinely ignored during the heated debates of the 20th century.
The point of recognizing the flaws within one of desegregation’s best-case scenarios is not, she says, to conclude that it’s ultimately a fruitless project. Rather, it serves as a guide for those who might want to figure out how to start anew.”
Read the full interview here
And here is a podcast, Doomed to Repeat! interviewing Dr. Erickson if you’d like to listen… https://soundcloud.com/nicolas-hoffmann-4/episode-1-segregation
And… you can also read more at the book’s FB page
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